Making the plinth for my questionnaire has been interesting. I had initially wanted to make something quite complicated. I wanted it to be an object in itself. This is easier said than done though. Ideally it would have been galvanised steel and quite carefully designed.

Okay, so I’m reminded of why I hate (hate hate hate) using other people’s scripts. The AJAX poller has stopped working. I’ve spent about two hours trying to figure out why, deleting and re-uploading different files, all sorts. It’s still not working. It’s been fine for ages. I’ve done nothing to it to the best of my knowledge. The vote goes on to the database. I checked. I checked the error log. No error. Does it give me the result graph back? Obviously not.

Very very very annoyed.

And what’s more, I have no idea what to do beyond deleting the whole thing and redoing it from scratch. I would naturally rather avoid this eventuality.
Very very very annoyed. Would blog about other things but want to fix other things having wasted so much time on that.

NB – Prospective employers please note that this problem was fixed the following day. You live and learn.

Hurrah. It’s now gone ten on Sunday and I’ve just spent most of the weekend getting nothing done because I’ve been looking for a decent captcha tutorial. They’re all either rubbish or built for wordpress. Very annoying. I’m beginning to wonder what the best course of action is.

On a brighter note, I found a word cloud that seems to work quite well. It’s called dynacloud.js and it’s pretty simple. So that’s there as and when I need it. Good.

I’ve been investigating how to make buttons that will give me a different kind of interactivity. Kenji’s shown me a few things. I’m undecided about the idea though. The whole point of the questionnaire (to my mind) has always been that in filling it out people will have a chance to think about the questions. That won’t happen if it’s just a case of hitting buttons. The process of thinking through an answer and typing it out is integral to the project.

Hmm. Well, I’ve fannied around for ages with writing this post and haven’t really written anything. I started writing something but it’s on my laptop and I can’t remember writing anything in it that I cared about at all. That’s probably not a good sign.

I want to write a short post, then, saying where i think I’m at. No doubt somewhat hilariously, I had a dream that changed my mind about my direction a little bit. In the dream Jonathan Kearney was telling me my prototype was boring as it was too much like a school text book or something. It was prescriptive. I woke up and immediately thought ‘I must look at Anselm Kiefer, Ansel Adams and Christian Boltanski again’. So there we go. This undoubtedly makes me sound like a muppet but it seems I achieve that pretty regularly anyway. The important thing is that those three artists mark a continuation of earlier thoughts and making something with a simple and direct, quite emotional presence. The thought didn’t just come from a dream, though it seems to have been part of the way my brain processed it. This is really a thought for the work in a gallery space. I may need a different approach for the online version.

I’ve had an idea in my head for the past few weeks, since the house gallery show, really. It’s of projecting my final site/questionnaire onto a big sheet of slate. It’s inspired by the grey I used for those canvases reminded me of slate. I think the image of slate is a really nice one. I like the feel and the weight of it. I’m considering trying to get a massive piece of slate and projecting my finished website on to it. I think that would help give it a bit of a presence. However, I’m wondering about the wisdom of privileging one showing of the piece over another. One thing I like about digital art is the fact that it’s such a level playing field viewing wise. Showing it projected on to slate in a gallery context would be a privileged viewing situation, I think. The version with the slate would be more privileged than the one you see online. It also changes the status of the work in a participatory context.

Okay, I really need to talk a bit about my reaction to the end of year show. Not so much what I thought of the work, but more a reaction to the show as a whole. I don’t like private views. I never find they’re the best time to look at work. I also feel uncomfortable at university shows because there’s so much work there. It’s difficult to look at any of it because there’s just so much to take in.

It reminded me of one of the key things that I really like about digital art. It can easily be web based. I find this very attractive. People can look at it in their own time. The kind of things I’m dealing with need time. I need to find a way of walking people through a thought process.
Galleries don’t have the space to do that. This comes with issues though. The way I’d been thinking was fairly definitely gallery based, with the idea of having everything layered in various media. So, that’s another ball that’s up in the air. Good.